It’s Up to Us in a Time of Technology
The impetus to create new devices, elaborating upon what went before until a whole new level of technology is achieved, is not inherent in human nature. The history of civilizations is full of technological dead ends. What was the goal of one culture became the beginning of a whole stream of development in another. Take the wheel.
We don’t know who invented it first. It may have been a potter, or it may have been a farmer eager to find a better way to transport a load. We do know that in the West, once noticed, wheels were paired and put on wheelbarrows, doubled again and attached to carts, and lined up with ropes to make them into simple machines--pulleys.
The great Mayan civilization in Mexico and Central America flourished at about the same time that Christianity was taking root in the Middle East and Europe. The Mayas were great architects who built large temple-cities without, it seems, the benefit of pulleys or wheeled carts. Yet they knew about the wheel, as miniature wheeled vehicles that look like toys have been found in their ruins. The mystery is why, if they knew enough to put them on toys, did they never develop wheels for work-saving devices?
Or what about the mechanical clock? Historian David Landes traces the first mechanical clock to 11th-Century China. Planned by Su Sung, a diplomat and amateur scientist, it was first made of wood, then reconstructed in bronze. This enormous clock occupied a 40-foot tower and reproduced the movements of the sun, the moon and selected stars. An assemblage of rings represented the paths of these heavenly bodies as they rotated on an axis tilted toward the horizon. These were driven by a pair of vertical transmission shafts, one of which bore enormous wheels that carried little figures that revolved with the wheel and shaft to show the hours and quarter hours. The whole machine was powered by a water wheel.
This great clock worked for several years until invaders carried part of it away. Most of the mechanism broke or wore down in the next few years and no one knew enough about it to build another. Not until the arrival of Christian missionaries 500 years later did the Chinese see a mechanical clock again. And when they did they admired and fussed over them, but made no attempt to copy or improve upon their workings.
The Chinese, in fact, had discovered a host of useful technologies, including movable type and gunpowder. Yet, like the mechanical clock, they saw these as ends in themselves, not as the first steps toward a printing press as in the case of type, powerful weapons as in the case of gunpowder, or a continuing preoccupation with precision in the measurement of time in the case of the clock.
We do not know as much about the Mayan civilization, whose written language we are still deciphering, as we do about the Chinese, whose records are excellent and whose civilization has been continuous from antiquity through the present. What we know about the Mayas is that they were agricultural, living largely off maize, and devoted most of their spare time to a religion that focused on astronomy and a complicated (and exceedingly accurate) calendar. What we do know suggests that it was a civilization in which labor was cheap and time plentiful enough so that there was no impetus to devise ways to make labor more economical. They did not need wheeled vehicles or machinery.
The mechanical clock that Su Sung developed used a water wheel to power it and, according to Landes, was probably more accurate than the relatively clumsy mechanical clocks that the Jesuits brought to China in their attempt to dazzle the Chinese with the accomplishments of Christendom. But, unlike the by-then-forgotten great water-powered clock, these were portable with fanciful moving figurines. They dazzled the courtiers, but not enough to inspire imitation. They could as easily have been admiring works of art as instruments to measure time.
This is, Landes explains, because it is not “natural” to human beings to want to know the precise time. The obsession with time as something that can be measured, and thus paid for in the sense of labor per unit of time, is what distinguishes the West from all other civilizations. It is what, he argues convincingly, compelled us to ever more technological ingenuity as we broke time down into smaller and more accurate units.
Inventions like the wheel and the mechanical clock do not carry within themselves the seeds of future technological innovation. They are used by societies as the societies see fit. All inventions are not genii in a Pandora’s box, that once released, have destinies of their own. Whether we can control the momentum of our own society is a complex moral, political and economic problem. But we dodge responsibility when we blame technology--be it nuclear, laser or biological--rather than the people who accept it without hesitation.
